Freedumb! Free to die of preventable diseases!
The dynamics of spread are hard to keep up with. New Zealand and Hong Kong used to be among the very lowest spread countries. But of course that means they’ve also got populations that are largely naïve to the virus compared to elsewhere.
With pandemic policies changing, this was an interesting assessment. Not really surprising, given the impact on the elderly and conflicts over the impact on children:
Time will tell if the lessons learned will lead to better management in the future.
Also, here’s something on the impact of the pandemic (strained healthcare systems) on refugees from Ukraine:
No point vaccinating healthy children for measles, mumps, chicken pox… Think of the money Florida will save. /s/s/s/s/s
So we had to go to the vet today for sick kitty. 95% of the staff was wearing a mask and everyone that came in contact with kitty wore a mask.
Almost all the customers wore a mask, the noticeable exception was the guy wearing the Trump hat, but… his teenage daughter (assume a family member) was wearing a mask.
The kids are sometimes smarter than the parents or adults.
That was in a little more blue county. On the way home we stopped at a drug store to get some milk in my very red very backwards county. No one in the store was wearing a mask except the pharmacists.
No wonder my state’s cases have dropped like a brick except in my county where positivity is still over 12% and daily cases are not following suit.
I gotta find a new place to live.
This is an interesting read.
I’m glad that he and I are on the same page. Outdoors no mask, but I still try to give space when chatting with people on a neighborhood walk. We ALWAYS wear a mask shopping. My husband and I visit with friends indoors and maskless, but we are all vaccinated and boosted. I work from home, but my husband has been going to his job (masked) and he’s now traveling again.
We’re not much into eating out in restaurants, but we have done so exactly three times since late February 2020. I still think it’s risky, more so than eating raw cookie dough if using his metric. I just thank dog that I live in a blue city, county, state so I don’t get hassled when masked.
Fingers crossed that the numbers continue to drop. 
Well, just COVID
Presumably they still have to vaccinate against measles and the other normal stuff
Anything parents had to do as children is what God intended—anything new and different is Satanic
That crowd will want to get rid of that too. Measles are already making a comeback.
The “COVID Eats Your Brain” study from last year has been published in Nature
We identified significant longitudinal effects when comparing the two groups, including: (i) greater reduction in grey matter thickness and tissue-contrast in the orbitofrontal cortex and parahippocampal gyrus, (ii) greater changes in markers of tissue damage in regions functionally-connected to the primary olfactory cortex, and (iii) greater reduction in global brain size. The infected participants also showed on average larger cognitive decline between the two timepoints. Importantly, these imaging and cognitive longitudinal effects were still seen after excluding the 15 cases who had been hospitalised.
As expected. Covid is bad, y’all. Can you imagine MAGAts with increased cognitive deficits? Soon, you will not need to imagine it.
Seriously, though: this is ONE virus. A bugger, for sure. But what the hell are all the other things doing to us which we don’t know about, yet?
If we somehow survive this century, as humanity, and science develops further, I think our descendants will look at what we didn’t know and shake their heads, sadly.
WDKS. Truly.
And you know what, that’s pretty exciting form a scientific perspective.
One of my hopes or the future is that this whole experience will spur more research into just what other postviral syndromes are out there. There has been speculation for decades that the 1918 pandemic was intimately connected to the subsequent outbreak of “encephalitis lethargica.” Even speculation (and it is pure speculation) that we could see a return of that weirdness.
Way too much about long term viral-human interactions are still unknown and largely unresearched, although that is changing. The next few years will be fascinating, if we manage to tame the current threats to continued existence, let alone academic endeavors.
94% of new zelanders have had at least two doses, so not that naive
in hong kong though, yeah. apparently vaccination rates among the elderly is very low
Vaccination rates among those aged 70-79 and 80-plus rose to 63.1% and 34.2% respectively on Wednesday from 61.9% and 33.2% a day earlier, government data showed. The 1.2% increase for the 70-79 segment was the highest single-day increase of any age group since vaccinations began in January 2021.
Fucking DeSantis.
His existence makes my blood boil. With all that wasted protoplasm, do you know how many perfectly good cockroaches (oops, FL. Palmetto bugs) we could have?
Ok, maybe “naïve” is the wrong term to use in this case since the vaccine obviously provides protection against serious illness from the virus. But their lack of prior exposure to the virus itself is clearly a factor in their current massive infection rate. Per worldometer they’ve had a case rate of about 30k per million of population over the last week, which is among the world’s highest at the moment. But thankfully deaths remain very low for now.
I think what we can learn from their experience is that their isolation strategy clearly bought them valuable time, during which they were able to get most of their population vaccinated. But the virus is too infectious to stop entirely. The best you can do is prepare your population for the time that they inevitably meet it, and ideally shore up the healthcare system as well.
Here’s what worries me about mainland China:
Despite their very high vaccination rate, their domestic vaccines are widely understood to not be as good as some of the mRNA types used elsewhere. Maybe they’re planning to revaccinate everyone with a newer type before ending their “zero covid” policy, but if not they can expect to see a very high infection rate when relaxing their policy (whenever that may be.) And as time passes, the limited protection that they’ve got will wane, if experience with other vaccines is any indication. So, interesting times ahead, most likely.
